It should not be a surprise to find that s/m fantasy is significant in women's sex lives. Women may be born free but they are born into a system of subordination. We are not born into equality and do not have equality to eroticise. We are not born into power and do not have power to eroticise. We are born into subordination and it is in subordination that we learn our sexual and emotional responses. It would be surprising indeed if any woman reared under male supremacy was able to escape the forces constructing her into a member of an inferior slave class.

Pornography, then, educates the male public. It would be very surprising if it did not.

Women are prevented by the threat and reality of male violence from entering public space on equal terms with male citizens.

Girls learn to love and have sexual feelings in a position of low status, and the eroticization of powerlessness is a normal part of the construction of femininity.

Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.

Recent literature on transsexualism in the lesbian community draws connections with the practices of sadomasochism.

Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men's rule over them. They do not represent 'truth' but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology.